


a family matter

by velmaddinkley



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: NotThem (The Magnus Archives), The Buried (The Magnus Archives) - Freeform, The Stranger (The Magnus Archives) - Freeform, Trauma, family arguments, parental abandonment, unhealthy family dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-18 17:55:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29986668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/velmaddinkley/pseuds/velmaddinkley
Summary: Case #9861016. Statement of Andrea Langdon, regarding her memories growing up. Original statement given 1986, November 16th.





	a family matter

ARCHIVIST

Statement of Andrea Langdon, regarding her memories growing up. Original statement given 1986, November 16th. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)

If you expect this to be the recount of some fantastic adventure, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. It’s not like I had an encounter with a ghost or something. I’m not an avid believer in the supernatural, nor a skeptic, and there’s very little about my story that can be useful to your collection. Besides, I can’t really do anything to prove any of this.

God, this is ridiculous. I'm sorry for wasting your time on something like this. I really don't think I should be here. It's not like I have anything extraordinary to tell. Frankly, I'm just doing this because some ~~friends~~ people I know from my college campus kept really insisting for me to give a statement. They are something of supernatural enthusiasts – if you want my opinion, they just really want to be a real-life version of Mystery Inc. But don’t tell them I said that. They’re nice people, I just sort of regret having told them anything, you know? And I'm pretty sure I'm going to regret talking to you as well.

When people talk about how they look back with fondness at their childhoods, I never really know what to say. Maybe it’s because I left my own past so quickly. All photographs ever taken of me were destroyed. I don’t have anything physical that reminds me of those times. I mean, except for a long scar I have in the back of my left hand. Everyone always asks, but there’s no dramatic history about it: I just fell on top of a thorny plant while learning how to ride a bicycle. Anyway, that’s irrelevant. My point is that I rarely miss the past.

Mom and dad were mostly regular people, although they weren't really loving parents. I think it all comes down to the fact that they didn't really seem to love each other. They just sort of... stuck together after I was born, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t planned. It's not like they acted harshly with me or with each other, but our relationship had always been distant. I think I can count on one hand the times my mom hugged me. She had a weirdly dry sense of humor. When she didn't want to deal with me, she would talk to me like she was someone else. I'd come to her, and she would say, in a very stern tone, "Mummy is out, I'm the evil witch she left to look after you". I would laugh and say "stop it, mummy!", and she would look at me as if I was out of my mind. “I’m not your mother”, she would insist. “And if you don’t behave, I’m going to get you”. And then I would just laugh and laugh and run away from her. I don’t know if I truly believed it or not. But I always laughed, only because I was so scared of how she could react if I cried instead. 

And dad... he just sort of existed, really. I don’t feel like I ever got to know him properly. He was always too busy with something. There’s not much else I can say.

But still, I know they loved me in their own way. I mean, ever since I can remember, mum would always sing me to sleep when I felt too scared of the dark. Dad would kiss my forehead every morning before he dropped me off to school, and he was very careful and kind to me after my bicycle incident.

When I was eight years old, we moved from our small house in Lisburn to an even smaller house in London. I can see the place so vividly in my mind – the grey concrete walls that we never got around to paint properly, the spider webs that seemed to gather in the most inconvenient spots, the creak of the doors when we opened them. There was a small area in the back that my dad promptly decided to turn into a garden – I wasn’t allowed near there, as mom and dad thought I would “ruin it”. The house in its entirety had the same size of a cottage, and my bedroom was the tiniest room.

I completely loved it. I didn’t even mind how tiny it was. It was comfortable, and I suppose the memory of the place itself could almost fill my heart with something similar to nostalgia. But it was also tiny enough for me to able to hear them yelling at each other from any of the rooms. They always had something to say about ungratefulness, about doing things and never being enough, or about regret.

I was pretty much used to their arguments, so at that age I didn’t even bother asking what was going on. From time to time this would happen, so my immediate reaction was to just hide in my room and to turn on the radio at maximum volume. It was never loud enough for me to not hear them, but I hoped that at least it would get them mad at me and they would forget they were arguing each other.

As weeks passed, we kind of silently agreed to eat separately, because having dinner together became painfully awkward. Dad started to spend more time in the garden, and he would only come inside at night when mum was already asleep, so they didn’t have to talk to each other. I barely saw him. Whenever I looked through the window, he was always digging the ground. I wondered why he dug it so much - it was a small garden, really, and I couldn't understand why he spent entire days working there. But whenever I asked, mom always just said he was "working", in that tone that indicated she didn't want any more questions.

It was hell. It didn’t feel like dad was at home, even though he was just there. Then one afternoon, when mum wasn’t around, he came into the kitchen when I was doing the dishes. I’d started to do more chores around the house, hoping that my well behavior could miraculously end the tension. When I wasn’t doing that, I spent the whole time inside my bedroom, fantasizing about escaping the house. It was something I could never be brave enough to do, but it was fun to imagine what I would bring with me.

Anyway. I felt quite relieved when I saw my dad approaching the house that day. But to my disappointment, his mere presence made me feel suffocated in a way like I never felt before. It was as though he was bringing the walls together. He didn’t do anything to cause this. He just silently poured himself a glass of water. I wanted to say something – it was my dad, I should talk to him. I wanted to comment about what I learned at school, to ask him about the garden, to tell him I missed having him around. He quickly drank his water and returned to the garden to do more digging.

Needless to say, none of my efforts to behave well and do chores did any good. One night, things got so heated that my mother decided to leave. Just like that. She put on her yellow raincoat, yelling about how she wouldn’t return, and just walked out of the house. Left everything behind. Including me. She didn’t stop to tell me goodbye, but she did stop tell my dad to “go to hell” once another time.

And obviously, I got terrified. Even though I was used to their arguments, this time it seemed like things weren’t getting better. I was used to the fighting, but none of them had ever left the house before. This was new territory. And the thought of living only with my dad terrified me – as I said, I felt like I barely knew him. He tried going after her, obviously, but I don’t think he really looked. He returned alone too quickly, and when I asked him if she wasn’t coming back, he just said he wasn’t sure, and resignedly threw himself down on his chair. I waited if he was going to say something else, but he just started zapping through the TV channels. The air started to feel too heavy for me to breath, so I went to my bedroom and cried myself to sleep.

I was abruptly awakened in the morning by the front door creaking noise, then steps, then loud voices. With a startle, I got from bed and ran downstairs like my life depended on it. Mom was at the door. She had returned, apparently, but she hadn’t _really_ returned.

I mean, it looked like her at first, when I looked from the top of the stairs. About the same height, the same yellow raincoat, the same characteristic posture. But her hair had changed – it was shorter now, maybe she’d got it cut. But when I approached, I realized her face was completely different too. I know what you’re going to think now – that I was only a child, that I was stressed out and scared and I could have imagined it. But it _wasn’t_ my mother, that I know for sure. It was someone that looked like her, that could perhaps pass as her in the distance, but it wasn’t quite like her.

Mom – or whatever was disguising itself as mom - didn’t smile as she saw me. She just mentioned something about how I shouldn’t run on the stairs. I didn’t say anything, and just looked at her, trying to understand. She then asked, “aren’t you going to hug your mother?” I looked at dad with hesitation, but he was just staring at her with the same annoyance he had been looking for the past year, and didn’t seem to notice anything unusual. I turned to mum again, and she looked at me with her arms open and a look of expectation. It felt too awkward to leave her hanging, so I just accepted the hug from that unknown woman pretending to be my mom.

Her presence didn’t do anything to change the tension from before. Rather, it made it worse. Dad avoided being near her, and I avoided it even more. I tried to talk about it with him, but it didn’t go very well. I told him that the person in our house wasn’t mom, and he just rambled about how he felt like he didn’t know her anymore as well. When I explained to him what I meant, that it literally wasn’t mom, but rather someone under a disguise, he just told me this didn’t make sense and went back to his garden. The air got too struck in my throat for me to come up with a counter point, so I dropped the subject for the moment. But I was determined to prove that I was right.

We didn’t really have the habit of taking photographs. It took us a long while to afford a camera, and by the time we had one, the arguments replaced any of our willingness to take family portraits or something. Still, I knew mum had some polaroids in the drawer of her nightstand. One afternoon, I decided to look for them. She was busy doing dinner, so I silently walked over her bedroom, being extra careful not to be heard. Fortunately, the door chose not to creak. I went over to her nightstand, and as I began to open the drawer, I peeked into it and saw a glimpse of some polaroids piled up there. My heart jumped a bit in my chest, but before I could see it more, I heard a voice asking, “What are you doing there?”

I turned around quickly. The woman who wasn’t my mom was standing at the door, looking at me with her eyes narrowed. I just managed to mumble a “um, nothing”. She raised her eyebrows at me. “What did I tell you about messing with my things before?” I really wanted to tell her that she hadn’t said nothing, because she wasn’t my mom and we hadn’t spoken before. But the look on her face intimidated me too much for that, so I just apologized. She stretched her hand to me and asked me to help her with dinner. I didn’t know what to make of that, but in the next morning, I noticed an unusual amount of ashes and burnt paper in the fireplace. The message was clear.

I couldn’t understand this. How could he not see it? How could everyone else not see it? It was so clear that this woman wasn’t my mother, and yet, everyone else treated her as if she was – my dad, the neighbours, their few acquaintances. How was it possible that no one had noticed she was a different woman?

I didn’t know what else to do. For weeks, I tried to convince myself that maybe I had imagined all of this. But every time that woman looked at me, I felt the complete lack of any familiarity with her, and my real mother’s face came up in my memories, vivid as ever. But I couldn’t prove any of this. And I couldn’t even rely on dad – he spent his entire days digging on the garden, he wouldn’t listen to me, he didn’t want to hear anything about mom and whenever we talked it was like there were invisible walls raising around me, standing between me and every bit of fresh air. I didn’t think it should be that difficult to talk to my own father. And I also didn’t think it was right for that person to steal my mother’s identity.

Suddenly I almost missed their loud fighting. Now there was only silence and a strange person living in my home like it was the most natural thing possible. Most nights, I couldn’t sleep while knowing she was there. There was no other reason for her to replace my mother. It wasn’t a life one would want to steal. What would she do, if not hurting me?

One night, the person pretending to be my mother scolded me for not being up so late. In an impulse, I asked her if she could sing me to sleep, like she did when I was little. She raised her eyebrows, seeming to have noticed the challenge, I could say it did make me fall asleep when she started singing, but not because it was soothing. It was a very aggressive hypnosis. My eyes started closing against my will, like the melody somehow forced me them to rest.

It took me one second to fall asleep. Maybe less. The last thing I saw, before growing unconscious, was the person pretending to be my mother smiling at me, as if she could hear my thoughts, as if my confusion amused her.

One day I tried to escape. I designed a plan in my head, and I even filled a small backpack with everything I thought I would need – two changes of clothes, my favorite stuffed animals, a book, and a pack of biscuits. But when I stopped at the door, I found myself unable to go on with it. I didn’t even have anywhere else to go. We didn’t have any extended family left, and I didn’t even have friends. Not to mention, I felt too scared of what could happen if she caught me.

I wish I could tell you that one day my father snapped out of it, that someone noticed, or that my real mother came back and took her place back. But no, the years just went on like that. The woman who wasn’t my mother spoke to me as if she was my mother. As if she was my mother, she also didn’t speak to my dad, who continued to work on his garden. I got a job as soon as I could. It was a chance to spend less time around her. My plan was to move out as soon as I was 18, but you know this is never how it happens. But I made a huge effort to save enough to get out of there quickly, because I couldn’t stand being there. It got to a point where none of us talked to each other if it wasn’t necessary. When I wasn’t working, I spent all the time inside my room. Whenever I was, I could hear my dad’s hard breath from digging the garden. I could hear the thing that wasn’t my mother doing the things that my real mother used to do.

The day before I left, I asked my father if he wanted to come with me. He had never given any indication to notice something wrong with my mother, but I thought perhaps I could at least get him away from her. He said he couldn’t leave his garden behind. I didn’t understand it, but I also didn’t insist. I feel horrible for not insisting, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to get away and breath fresh air again.

I didn’t say goodbye to the person that wasn’t my mother. I don’t know how long it took for her to realize I was gone. For a long time, I still couldn’t sleep in my new home, too scared that any second she was going to burst in. But I never heard of them again. Everything that was tying me to them is just gone. It's could be almost like they never existed. 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!  
> i apologize for any typos, as I don't have a beta  
> feel free to let me know what you thought and how it made you feel!


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